Start by creating a selection of a person that you are going to use. Here I started to select the background with the magic wand tool and then went into quick mask mode to further define the selection.

Press Q to enter the quick mask mode and use a brush with black as your foreground color. The red area is your deselected area.  Quick masking is covered in-depth in the Basic Photoshop DVD training program because it is such a great way to get selections without too much mental anguish.

Press Q again to exit the quick mask mode and see your selection. You can also use the extract tool to get selections which works well with hair. Stay tuned for upcoming Extract tool tutorials.

You can save a selection to a channel. The .psd format will store the channel when you save the file. It is very easy to select from the channel (for example Load Selection and choose the channel) or you can save it to a work path (right click). Anytime you make a complicated selection that you may use in the future you’ll probably want to save it.

You could also Layer: new layer via copy to put the selection onto its own layer. Its important to understand the different ways to do things in Photoshop.

Now use the move tool by placing it inside the selection, clicking and then dragging it to the desired document. This is the same as copy and pasting and retains the original in its place.

Do some scaling if needed to get the layer down to the size that you want. Here we want her to be the focal point of the design taking up most of the space. A kind of ethereal portrait.

Note that there are still light areas on her hair (from the light background originally). This is what I want because I am going to be doing some lightbleeding and other good stuff as you will see.

Drag the layer to the new layer icon to copy it and once again, I’m going to do some blending mode magic here. Put the top layer on linear burn.

Put the bottom layer on overlay. When using blending modes, you will always get slightly different results depending on your situations because the b modes mix the existing light with the layer and the (visible) layer(s) beneath it.

Here I’m going to do some lightbleeding on a layer mask with the diamond gradient tool to let the sunlight shine through part of her hair.

Go ahead and mask some more on the darker of the two layers to let some light bleed through (in this case; linear burn). The other layer will be softer and maintain the overall ‘form’ of the girl in this case.

Here you can see what it looks like when I turn off the darker, linear burn layer with just the overlay showing.

And here is the linear burn going solo. You can tell that we want the lighter overlay mode beneath to bring up the darker areas. By using both blending modes, we are able create a nice contrast while mixing with the background layer to make her a part of the sky, yet still hold her own as the focal point.

Choose an image that you think would be complementary to the design. Here we already have a similar hue so we shouldn’t have to make any major adjustments (unless we create a global adjustment layer later which would take care of things right away).

Drag it into the document and scale it down and place it where you think it should go with the move tool.

Note the layer order in the layers palette: behind her and as part of the dreamy background.

If you’re reading the other tutorials or have the Basic Photoshop DVD training program, you know the deal: create a layer mask and get rid of those harsh lines to convert a photographic layer into a design layer.

If you like the hue of the image you brought in and want to make that the overall color then bring up the color balance on the original background layer and make adjustments until your eyes are happy.

You can see the color balance adjustment layer has created a richer, sunset reddish/orange effect quite well.

You can create another adjustment layer and hide it later or just modify the settings by double clicking on the adjustment layer icon in the layers palette and change the settings. Here I’ve colorized to a midnight blue. This effect is used all the time in movie posters and film marketing.

Go ahead and you can fool around with the placement of the hue adjustment layer in the layers palette order. Anything above it will not be affected by the hue (in this case you can’t really tell because the layer is mostly masked and on a blending mode anyways).

Note how well the light areas of her hair on the left side (her right) work well as they are lit up from behind because of the blending mode attributes (linear burn layer being masked to let light bleed through with the softer overlay holding the pixels there and lighting up).

And here are the two versions of the final product.  In Photoshop CS you could turn these versions on and off with the layer comps palette.  This design is available for free in the iPSD Directory or if you signed up for the PSDer ezine at the bottom of the page. 

To uncover many more hidden secrets of Photoshop and real-world design, be sure to check out my Discover Photoshop: Total Package (it's so filled with powerful information you won't know where to start).

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